10 Understand Quality Testing

This chapter contains the topic:

Section 10.1, "About Quality Testing."

10.1 About Quality Testing

The Load and Delivery Management system interfaces with the Quality Management system to allow you to record testing results at load confirm. You must have installed Quality Management, system 37, to use this feature. To activate, you must turn on the Quality Management flag in the Branch/Plant Constants program.

Features of quality management consist of:

Setting up tests and defining samples and effective date ranges for specific tests.
Grouping tests that should be performed together with a test specification.
Setting up preference profiles for item, item group, customer, and customer group combinations.
Entering testing results. This is done at load confirm in the Load and Delivery Management system.
Reviewing tests and specifications by item or depot.
Printing a Certificate of Analysis for customers or printing results on delivery documents.

In Quality Management, you use an item test specification preference to customize tests and specifications for customer and item combinations. The system uses this information to determine how Quality Management interfaces with programs in other systems, such as the Confirm Bulk Load and Confirm Packaged Load programs.

To require testing results at load confirm, you specify so on the Test Definition form in the Quality Management system. This can be overridden at the preference level. At load confirm, if testing is required, you can record results on a trip-based version of the Test Results Revisions form.

Because the Confirm Bulk Load program does not have the sales order information necessary to apply preferencing, the resulting records are created during trip creation. You specify in the processing options for Trip Creation/Maintenance whether to require test results to be entered for each different customer or item or for every item in every compartment. The system retrieves the different combinations of item, item group, customer, and customer group for each item on a sales order or for each item within a compartment. The system then accesses the Item Test Specification records and creates the appropriate test results records. During load confirm, the system retrieves the records on the Test Results Revisions form, allowing you to enter the test results.

The system checks every order line on a trip for testing requirements. The processing option can be set to require test results for every compartment on the order line or to require test results only for the first compartment of the order line.

If you choose to require test results for every item, every compartment and will have more than one order for a vehicle compartment, you must set up preferences based on customer group so that all customers' testing requirements are included in the set of tests. If you set up preferences based on the vehicle compartment, you must confirm the load by trip, rather than by order.